Quotes to inspire and reflect

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

 

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

 

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

 

It little profits that an idle king,

 

I am become a name;

 

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

 

The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.

 

My strength is as the strength of ten,

 

Alone and warming his five wits,

 

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea,

 

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay.

 

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

 

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

 

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

 

Rose a nurse of ninety years,

 

Like summer tempest came her tears.

 

Home they brought her warrior dead.

 

Dear as remembered kisses after death.

 

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

 

Sweet and low, sweet and low,

 

The splendour falls on castle walls

 

God-gifted organ-voice of England,

 

With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,

 

After it, follow it,

 

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

 

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls.

 

Come into the garden, Maud,

 

I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.

 

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

 

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

 

Death is the end of life; ah, why

 

Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point.

 

Forward, forward let us range,

 

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

 

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled

 

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

 

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,

 

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:

 

In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;

 

Out flew the web and floated wide;

 

Airy, fairy Lilian.

 

‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river

 

She left the web, she left the loom,

 

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,